Blondell Cummings: Dance as Moving Pictures

Blondell Cummings: Dance as Moving Pictures PDF

Author: Kristin Juarez

Publisher:

Published: 2021-11-15

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 9781737838807

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Blondell Cummings: Dance as Moving Pictures is the first monograph dedicated to the pivotal work of African American choreographer and video artist Blondell Cummings. The book accompanies an exhibition of the same name co-organized by the Getty Research Institute and Art + Practice, on view at Art + Practice in Los Angeles from September 18, 2021 through February 19, 2022.A foundational figure in dance, Cummings bridged postmodern dance experimentation and Black cultural traditions. Through her unique movement vocabulary, which she called "moving pictures," Cummings combined the visual imagery of photography and the kinetic energy of movement in order to explore the emotional details of daily rituals and the intimacy of Black home life. In her most well-known work Chicken Soup (1981), Cummings remembered the family kitchen as a basis for her choreography; the dance was designated an American Masterpiece by the National Endowment for the Arts in 2006. This book draws from Cummings's personal archive and includes performance ephemera and numerous images from digitized recordings of Cummings's performances and dance films; newly commissioned essays by Samada Aranke, Thomas F. DeFrantz, and Tara Aisha Willis; remembrances by Marjani Forté-Saunders, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Meredith Monk, Elizabeth Streb, Edisa Weeks, and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar; a 1995 interview with Cummings by Veta Goler; and transcripts from Cummings's appearances at Jacob's Pillow and the Wexner Center for the Arts. Bringing together reprints, an extended biography, a chronology of her work, rarely seen documentation, and new research, this book begins to contextualize Cummings's practice at the intersection of dance, moving image, and art histories.

Engaging Bodies

Engaging Bodies PDF

Author: Ann Cooper Albright

Publisher: Wesleyan University Press

Published: 2013-11-20

Total Pages: 408

ISBN-13: 0819574120

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Winner of the Selma Jeanne Cohen Prize in Dance Aesthetics (2014) For twenty-five years, Ann Cooper Albright has been exploring the intersection of cultural representation and somatic identity in dance. For Albright, dancing is a physical inquiry, a way of experiencing and participating in the world, and her writing reflects an interdisciplinary approach to seeing and thinking about dance. In her engagement as both a dancer and a scholar, Albright draws on her kinesthetic sensibilities as well as her intellectual knowledge to articulate how movement creates meaning. Throughout Engaging Bodies movement and ideas lean on one another to produce a critical theory anchored in the material reality of dancing bodies. This blend of cultural theory and personal circumstance will be useful and inspiring for emerging scholars and dancers looking for a model of writing about dance that thrives on the interconnectedness of watching and doing, gesture and thought.

The Artists' Prison

The Artists' Prison PDF

Author: Alexandra Grant

Publisher:

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 157

ISBN-13: 9780998861616

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The Artists' Prison looks askance at the workings of personality and privilege, sexuality, authority, and artifice in the art world. Imagined through the heavily redacted testimony of the prison's warden, written by Alexandra Grant, and powerfully allusive images by Eve Wood, the prison is a brutal, Kafkaesque landscape where creativity can be a criminal offence and sentences range from the allegorical to the downright absurd. In The Artists' Prison, the act of creating becomes a strangely erotic condemnation, as well as a means of punishment and transformation. It is in these very transformations--sometimes dubious, sometimes oddly sentimental--that the book's critical edge is sharpest. In structural terms, The Artists' Prison represents a unique visual and literary intersection, in which Wood's drawings open spaces of potential meaning in Grant's text, and the text, in turn, acts as a framework in which the images can resonate and intensify in significance.

High Winds

High Winds PDF

Author: Sylvan Oswald

Publisher:

Published: 2017-06-10

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 9780998861609

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How does sleep--or its absence--change us? At the end of another wakeful night, High Winds tears off on a hallucinatory road trip in search of his estranged half brother, led by cryptic signs and coincidences. Part modern-day pillow book, part picture book for adults, and told in an associative, elliptical style, the narrative takes readers deep into a dreamlike Western landscape. Jessica Fleischmann's atmospheric imagery amplifies the words on every page, referencing 1980s graphics, net art, and something yet unseen; Sylvan Oswald's text inhabits and draws meaning from this visual environment. Gas stations, local legends, and unlikely rock formations become terrain for explorations of fear, fantasy, masculinity, medication, spatial structures, and bodily functions--inspired by the author's experience of gender transition, insomnia, and moving to Los Angeles. Poetic and funny, surreal and beautiful--High Winds makes a delightful companion, before or instead of a good night's sleep.

The Thriving Artist

The Thriving Artist PDF

Author: David Maurice Sharp

Publisher: CRC Press

Published: 2015-02-11

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 1317611411

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The old cliché about the "starving" artist may have a basis in reality, but it isn’t set in stone! The Thriving Artist provides valuable advice for the performing artist, whether you’re an actor, dancer, lighting guru, costumer, or stagehand, on investing, saving, and building a diversified and stable financial portfolio. Written specifically for artists who have fluctuating, uncertain, and sometimes limited streams of income, this book promotes an understanding of finances and the investment world for the artist by offering clear, basic explanations of how finances work and instruction on how to participate in them as an investor. It also provides unique strategies for integrating financial awareness and planning into your life as an artist, and how that can help to provide a better sense of financial security. With The Thriving Artist, author David Maurice Sharp guides you with unflappable good humor through the tricky financial waters that come with following your passion.

Work 1961-73

Work 1961-73 PDF

Author: Yvonne Rainer

Publisher: Halifax, N.S. : Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design ; New York : New York University Press

Published: 1974

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13:

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On a shopping trip to the department store, Max's determination to get a dragon shirt leads him away from his distracted sister and into trouble.

Exhausting Dance

Exhausting Dance PDF

Author: Andre Lepecki

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2006-07-13

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 1134230893

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The only scholarly book in English dedicated to recent European contemporary dance, Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement examines the work of key contemporary choreographers who have transformed the dance scene since the early 1990s in Europe and the US. Through their vivid and explicit dialogue with performance art, visual arts and critical theory from the past thirty years, this new generation of choreographers challenge our understanding of dance by exhausting the concept of movement. Their work demands to be read as performed extensions of the radical politics implied in performance art, in post-structuralist and critical theory, in post-colonial theory, and in critical race studies. In this far-ranging and exceptional study, Andre Lepecki brilliantly analyzes the work of the choreographers: * Jerome Bel (France) * Juan Dominguez (Spain) * Trisha Brown (US) * La Ribot (Spain) * Xavier Le Roy (France-Germany) * Vera Mantero (Portugal) and visual and performance artists: * Bruce Nauman (US) * William Pope.L (US). This book offers a significant and radical revision of the way we think about dance, arguing for the necessity of a renewed engagement between dance studies and experimental artistic and philosophical practices.

Noah Davis

Noah Davis PDF

Author: Noah Davis

Publisher: David Zwirner Books

Published: 2020-09-01

Total Pages: 88

ISBN-13: 1644230372

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Providing a crucial record of the painter Noah Davis’s extraordinary oeuvre, this monograph tells the story of a brilliant artist and cultural force through the eyes of his friends and collaborators. Despite his exceedingly premature death at the age of 32, Davis’s paintings have deeply influenced the rise of figurative and representational painting in the twenty-first century. Davis’s emotionally charged work places him firmly in the canon of great American painting. Stirring, elusive, and attuned to the history of painting, his compositions infuse scenes from everyday life with a magical realist atmosphere and contain traces of his abiding interest in artists such as Marlene Dumas, Kerry James Marshall, Fairfield Porter, and Luc Tuymans. This catalogue is born of the unique relationship between Davis and Helen Molesworth, whom Davis entrusted to be the curator of his work. It is published on the occasion of the 2020 exhibition at David Zwirner, New York, which travels to The Underground Museum in Los Angeles, a space that Davis founded with his wife, artist Karon Davis. In her introduction, catalogue essay, and interviews with important figures in Davis’s life, Molesworth shows how the artist’s generosity and sense of responsibility galvanized a uniquely supportive artistic community, culture, and vision. Together with color illustrations and archival photographs, the book features heartfelt testimonials that unfold in the intimate yet expansive spirit of studio visits with people close to him.